Strangely, our happiest day can be inseparable from our greatest grief. Our highest peaks of joy begin the path that to our deepest valleys. What do we do with these feelings and emotions? I’ve found writing a poem helps, call it therapy without a therapist, but I’ve found poetry to be helpful and therapeutic on life’s journeys.
I have written poems that are special to me, they have a significance that mere words cannot convey accurately, not without the art of poetry at least. Poems help me understand and process and even appreciate the intensity of the experience.
Sometimes a poem simply hits you out of nowhere, with a jolt, some inspiration from an experience, an insight, what have you, it comes instantly and you ride the wave as you quickly try to write down your thoughts before they evaporate. Other poems need time to simmer.
You think the theme over. Then, like the example of a poem you’ll find below, there are times when a poem is years in the making. Here’s a poem that I wrote in over the course of about a month but it was 15 years of life and living that inspired & influenced this poem. You can’t simply make up or create a poem like this one from imagination alone, you live through the joys and the sorrows, you watch a child grow over the years into a man as his best friend lives and dies in real time. When you give a puppy to a son who is a preteen and then you sit by his side many years later as the veterinary helps the old dog cross the rainbow, it hurts and you feel guilty for causing the pain. The discovery of how significant the relationship is and that life can deliver pain through love is a difficult topic and the power of poetry is that poems are the best way to express this emotion and sensation.
